Guide to Back Up BOINC Projects

tl;dr: Set a project’s resource share to 0

Preamble:

It can be relatively frustrating when, without your knowledge, your BOINCing computer runs out or stops receiving tasks and ends up sitting idly and doing nothing. Having experienced this myself and after finding a solution I’ve decided to write a quick guide for setting up a backup project that your cruncher automatically uses if it stops receiving tasks from your main project.

Step 1: Choosing the Project

If you want to play it safe you should choose a project that is unlikely to stop producing tasks anytime soon. The bigger budget ones such as SETI and Rosetta are good choices (though these are less lucrative Gridcoin projects). Most projects should be fine in the short to mid term as it is unlikely that both your main and backup projects go down at the same time.

Step 2: Setting Up the Project

After choosing your project, set it up like any other project and attach it to your machine. Then make sure your client will only get tasks if there aren’t any others tasks available by setting the resource share of the project to 0 (source). There are two ways to do this:

1. Through BAM 
2. Through the project's online preferences

Method 1:

Login to your BAM account and go to the My Projects page. Then change the resource values as required. You can also change them per machine if you go to the host list, select the host and then edit projects.

Method 2:

Login to your project’s website and navigate to your profile. Although it varies this is usually where project settings can be found. Then open the preferences of the project and change the resource share value to 0. Below is how to do it with SETI.

Finale:

And that’s it. There should hopefully be no wasted computation in your future. Thanks for reading and if you have any questions about BOINC, Gridcoin, or anything, feel free to ask!